We’ve been going back and forth between directories & listing out already available files. Let’s take it up a notch & create files of our own!

Come back to your home directory if you were lost trying out variants of cd from the previous section. Verify using pwd as always.

I watched K.G.F: Chapter 1 last night and I’m planning to store all movies I watch and some info about those, like synopsis, review etc. To start with, let’s create a directory structure like this in the home directory

/home/crio-user

	|- kgf

	    |- cast.txt

	    |- part1

	    	\- synopsis.txt

	    |- part2

\- synopsis.txt

Hmm, first we’ll create the directories required & then the files. mkdir is the command we need to make directories in Linux and we feed it the name of the new directory we want to create. So, we’d use mkdir kgf to create a directory called kgf. As we were in the home directory, the absolute path of the folder will be /home/crio-user/kgf (we could also do mkdir /home/crio-user/kgf). We’ll create the subdirectories using the mkdir command as well. Instead of using cd to go to the kgf directory and then using mkdir part1 we can use relative path to create the new directory from the home directory itself i.e., both the below sets of commands do the same thing.

cd kgf

mkdir part1

mkdir part2

Or

mkdir kgf/part1

mkdir kgf/part2

Cool. Now, we need to add files. That’d be the touch command. Come back to the kgf directory using cd if you are somewhere else. Execute touch part1/synopsis.txt to create a file named synopsis.txt inside part1 directory.

Similarly, create a synopsis.txt file inside part2 directory as well.

I’ll add the synopsis for part1 as it’s already out. nano command lets us edit files and is one of the default editors on Ubuntu. There would be other editors as well. Using nano part1/synopsis.txt will open the file for us to edit. After adding the required text

1. Hit Ctrl + x

2. Enter y when asked if to save

3. Hit Enter as we don’t need to change the file name we’re writing to

To verify the data was indeed saved, we can use the cat command to print out contents of a file. Execute cat part1/synopsis.txt

We have one more file to create - cast.txt. Execute touch part1/cast.txt to create it. With that, we have created all the directories and files as planned. It’s always good to verify when we’re done with something. cd to the kgf directory & execute tree command to print out a layout of files & directories under it.

Oops! The cast.txt file should’ve been inside the kgf directory and not inside kgf/part1.

We can copy the file to the kgf directory and then remove part1/cast.txt. From the kgf directory, use

1. cp part1/cast.txt . - to copy the part1/cast.txt file to directory denoted by "." which we know from our earlier discussion is the current directory

2. rm part1/cast.txt - to remove the part1/cast.txt file

Use the tree command now to verify the structure again